We All Have Our Best Life Stories to Share - This is Mine
We All Have Our Best Life Stories to Share - This is Mine
Welcome to memoirs Monday
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On a personal note: Please excuse grammatical errors, typos, repetition, and any general nonsense, and such in this post. I am getting a bit older now, and I have about 20,000 pages of information that must get published before I leave the mortal coil. I simply write and publish more than my humble editors are able to correct. If you find enough errors you are welcome to contact me about being an editor of my work.
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A 6 minute read
I believe we all need to write our memoirs. That it is important. Whether journaling or actually writing you life story, it is important for creating and sustaining introspection - a key element to having a meaningful life.
We all have people, places, and things that have passed through our lives and impacted the choices we have made. Think of all the unseen, events that have influenced your path, even events that happened, a thousand years ago to some ancestor…and after a long, seemingly endless series of events, little undulating ripples in the ocean of life, here you are rYou don’t need to be famous or an influencer to write a memoir. You will never know how you effect the lives of others.
For instance, about thirty years ago, I wrote and published a book on fats and oils. (See the cover below). I was proud of it, but it was not, what they call a success. Within the book was a paragraph about the dangers of Rapeseed farming. Rapeseed is what Canola Oil is made from.
Years after the book was published and had gone out of print (I still have 500 copies in my basement), I received a letter from a young woman in Idaho. Her farther, was a Rapeseed grower, and had serious medical problems that no doctor was able to diagnose. That one paragraph in my commercial flop and seemingly inconsequential book solved the mystery. In the end, he got out of the Rapeseed fields and his symptoms disappeared almost immediately. According to his daughter’s letter, My writing “saved his life!”
We never really know the impact we can have on others, often in unseen ways.
With this in mind I have begun writing my memoirs. Let’s me begin here.
I have been a spiritual seeker for as long as I can remember. I was raised as an observant Jew in the Bronx, in New York City. I received a formal religious instruction in the local synagogue from teachers who as much as I can recall had plenty of information about rites, rituals and ceremonies but little wisdom concerning spirituality. Being fair to them it is possible that they had great wisdom but hid whatever actual wisdom they had from their young students.
From as far back as I can recall I was an outsider of sorts. I was often being reprimanded for asking the “wrong questions” at the “wrong time” of the “wrong people” in the “wrong places” for the “wrong reasons”. This was painful for me. I acted out in dysfunctional ways, I had what one a psychologist might call “behavioral issues”.
I attended New York City public schools and in my earliest school days I was often shunted to the back of the classroom where I absorbed the words and ideas I discovered in the encyclopedias that lined the back walls. There I would sit by myself “out of the way”. Even here I would listen to what was being taught and I insisted on asking questions. “What is the purpose of memorizing a long poem and reciting it back if you don’t understand what it means” I would ask. Teachers called this disruptive. I continued to ask questions and continued to be reprimanded. At the end of the school year they would automatically move me onto the next level no matter how poor my test scores might be.
This attitude of my teachers towards the inquiries of this “disruptive” young man might have resulted in the shutting down of an inquisitive mind. – however it didn’t. As I moved from grade to grade I became deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of subject, though none of them had much to do with what was being taught in class. I became a very knowledgeable young person with very poor grades. From the time I entered public school until my third year of college I struggled both socially and academically.
Luckily for me, and possibly the result of some divine intervention (if such things exist) there were two great gifts I received in those days of my youth. The first gift was having two loving, unique and extraordinary parents. My mother, was the child of Polish immigrants. My maternal grandfather was a kind man who had found a trade as a tool and dye-maker and who bring me strangely shaped “home-made” wooden blocks to play with. They were larger than the store bought kind and uncolored. I would use crayons to make my own designs. These larger undefined wooden forms may have been the source for my need to create my own reality and color it as I pleased. My mother had a fearless independent streak about her. Her mother as the case with most women at the time was a homemaker and a full time parent. My mother was always looking to break loose from that “prison” of patriarchal thinking. My father first saw her at a basketball game in a Brooklyn gym in 1942. She was 24 years of age, at 5’9’ and was the center for one of the otherwise all male basketball teams. She was a dental hygienist by training, and married late for the times (the 1940s). She spent much of her time “dragging” me to various cultural events including museum openings, the zoo, Broadway plays and musicals, opera’s, lectures on natural history, the botanical gardens and more. We would ride the city bus from the Bronx, through the Dominican Neighborhood of Washington Heights, down through Harlem, and down Fifth Avenue where all the Art museums were and where the rich people lived. This was a counter-balance to the trouble I was always getting into in school. When she wasn’t keeping me out of trouble she spent her remaining time volunteering to teach children with cerebral palsy to swim at the local YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association). She instilled in me, at a very early age, the importance of serving others. One of the highlights of my youth was being old enough (thirteen years of age) to join her in teaching these same children to swim. Through all of this she was baffled by her “very strange” poorly behaved and underachieving child. She often cried about it.
My mother was a spiritual seeker and didn’t know it. She read volumes of biographies of the great, the near great and the not-so-great, seeking to learn as much as she could. Possibly the secret to greatness? Of course she already had the secret.
My father, the son of polish-Russian immigrants sold home furnishings to black people in the 1940’ through the early 1970s. His roots in this community came from his father, a lawyer by training who had left Russia in the first decades of the twentieth century to avoid the Czar’s army. He was either seeking to avoid being conscripted into it or abused by it. I never learned which. I’m not sure of the historical facts. My father’s father opened a cigar store on the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem during the “Harlem Renaissance “. His wife died in the “Flu” epidemic of 1918 and he quickly married her first cousin, whose only child was born with Down’s Syndrome and sent to an institution. This woman, who I know as my paternal grandmother “grandma Rose” raised my father in backroom of that store. When he was old enough he left Harlem, and spent a few years living a life defined by an unfocused wanderlust.
When he returned from his youthful wanderlust and various adventures my father opened a small business in the mid-1940s selling home furnishings to Black people. This was at a time where racial segregation was the norm. It made no sense to him and he certainly had no intention of paying any attention to the practice. His base of operation was a small showroom in the Eastern part of NYC’s Greenwich Village, the home of many Easter European Immigrants. By the early 1960s, this area was slowly becoming the center of the new “hippie” counterculture and I got to see it unfold on weekends when I came to his shop and watched him do what he did. . He later moved his base to the heart of New York’s “Chinatown”. In both the Greenwich Village location and Chinatown, he brought his network of Muslim Imams, Roma (gypsies), and black preachers who would direct their congregations and families to him. He sold carpets, chandeliers and mass produced paintings for a wide range of artistic tastes . He often went to their homes carrying stacks of product catalogues and brought me with him. I got to know the “King of the Gypsies”, my father sold him a sofa. I knew the Imam of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 7 on a 116th Street in Harlem. You would know them as the Black Muslims, and Malcolm X was the chief minister there.
I spent endless hots with Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates (October 11, 1907 – December 8, 1998) a black, one-legged tap dancer and acclaimed entertainer. Bates had lost a leg at the age of 12 in a cotton gin accident in the South. He subsequently taught himself to tap dance with a wooden peg leg. Bates performed on The Ed Sullivan Show 22 times, and had two command performances before the King & Queen of England in 1936 and then again in 1938. He later opened a resort in the Catskill Mountains that catered to Black entertainers of the day.
As I passed through my adolescence through my teen years I spent much of my time surviving school and metaphorically speaking, swimming off of the mainstream. I went to school every day yet my real life was among Chinese people, American blacks, Caribbean immigrants “fresh off the boat”, Hispanics, Christian Ministers, entertainers, Catholic Nuns, Bebop Jazz musicians, Muslim Imams and a wide range of eccentrics, deep thinkers, and people who lived life on the edge. Many of them made up their own rules for how to not only survive but prosper, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
From the very beginning my parents instilled me an understanding of “fairness”. They always had a sense of empathy and compassion towards others, especially towards ethnic minorities and the disenfranchised. They were not political people and yet they were willing to stand up for what they thought was right and fair on a personal level. They both had a natural “edge” about them and there was something about my father that demanded respect without being threatening to anyone. Much as one might sense of a very eccentric Aikido master. One story my mother often repeated was of my father “knocking-out” a made mafioso at a New Year’s Eve Buffet, when the tough guy began to bully an old man. My father interceded, the tough guy called my father a “fucking kike”, and the next thing my mother knew my dad was being escorted from the venue by five cops (not to arrest him but to protect him).
Harold Harrison was vibrant and alive with a passion for tennis. He claimed to have studied violin at the Julliard school of music and had a violin, and a banjo in the closet along with old 78 rpm record. I saw him play the violin once, but never the banjo or those albums. He was pretty good.
Being around my mother and father, two extraordinary individuals as well as my older sister Lily created a foundation of inquiry, independent thinking, and the willingness to ignore authority in the quest for truth. My parents did not suffer fools lightly and I was raised by them to think the same way. This also made me appear very strange to what Lao Tzu refers to, without any sense of elitism as “ordinary” people
A strong foundation for my personal development came with what I would describe as the second invaluable gift I received - Visionary, out – of-the box thinkers who were willing to Mentor me. From the moment I entered public school at five years of age there was always some stranger who would see that there was something unusual, unique, possibly extraordinary about me and they would take me under their wing.
This happened consistently. It might be the porter at the synagogue, a teacher at school, a wealthy businessperson for whom I may have served while working as a waiter, or a psychologist I met when driving a taxi cab.
One of my earliest mentors was Ella Davis, a Georgia born domestic worker that came once a week to our home and planted many important seeds of wisdom in me just by being who she was. She and my mother became close friends and just before her passing around 1999, she flew to NY to attend my wedding to my extraordinary wife Lilia, soon after I turned 47 years of age and close to forty years after she entered our family.
When I was 14, soon after an early sexual exploration (light stuff) the young woman gave me a copy of the Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. It changed my life!
The following year a dentist that my mother was working for (a Park Ave. dentist of the rich and famous who would later help keep me out of the military and the Vietnam War) gave a simple gift. Life Ahead by J. Krishnamurti. I would meet and study with Kristnamurti years later. This book was the perfect addition to what I had learned from reading Watts.
In my last year of high school, pretty much lost and confused, I was introduced to something called NEYO, The National Ethical Youth Organization. This was a structured Friday evening youth gathering at The New York Society For Ethical Culture is a Humanist community dedicated to ethical relationships, social justice, and democracy. Founded in 1876 there mission statement focused on the celebration of life’s joys, supporting each other through life’s challenges, and working together to build a more just world. It was exactly what I needed. At NEYO, I learned about art, culture, meditation, critical thinking, yoga, and so much more. It was my life support system
After graduating high school I shipped off to Sullivan County Community College SCCC), a new school in the Catskills, filled with locals and ex-patriots from New York City, who need an education chance. That’s what we called SCCC, Second Chance Community College.
By 1969, and I was living in a trailer with a leaky roof, on a back country road. I had some clue about what was important, some spiritual hunger, yet was still lost. I flopped around SCCC in the cold winter snow, getting high, organizing anti Vietnam war demonstrations, trying to getting laid, and hitchhiking to classes that I slept through .
One of my student counselors, Dan Novak had gotten a haircut in town and had invited the barber, who he had found fascinating and brilliant to speak to the students. The barber’s name was Vincent Collura, and he wasn’t just a barber. Vince was a retired championship level boxer, a long distance runner, and a mystic yogi, shaman, Taoist, and Zen teacher. I sought him out daily in his little shop and he became my first “Guru”. He invited me to dinner nightly and I became part of a community of 10 -15 young people who all considered him to be their teacher. Two of the group were studying Islam, and Sufism. Others were atheists, Orthodox Jews, and two of the women claimed to be Tantra yogis, but they were really just libertines who seduced us all and slept their way through the group, much to Vincent’s consternation.
Vincent kept thousands of books in his house, including every book ever written by Alan Watts and Krishnamurti. In addition he was a vegetarian, generally calm in demeaner, and a great listener. I had met the first person to truly understand me.
Vincent took me under his wing and over the next twenty years planted most of the seeds in me that have endured and enabled me to become the mentor, teacher, and friend to others that I am today. Of course, I am more than ever still a seeker and student.
I could go on, but there is only so much you are likely to be willing to read in a Substack article. I will share more with you in each Memoir Monday
Throughout my life I have studied and spent time with many great committed and generous mentors, and teachers. Some in greater depth and for greater lengths of time than others. At this stage of my life, I am still being mentored, both formally and informally.
Over the years, I have produced close to 20,000 pages of material on personal development, human potential, human behavior, strategic thinking, prepping and spirituality.
I am passionate about sharing it all with you.
Thanks for your time and interest in reading this piece about my life.
Lewis Harrison
AskLewis.com
If you enjoyed this article you may also enjoy this recent one on writing you memoir.
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Author: Hey there. My name is Lewis Harrison, and I created this newsletter. I am a transformational coach, teacher, and prepper. I am a proponent of entrepreneurism and also a writer and seminar leader. The author of over twenty books, and numerous self-improvement, business success, and personal development courses, I am the former host of a talk show on NPR Affiliated WIOX91.3 FM.
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